The Wii U is arguably one of the hottest topics at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, due to the fact that it is Nintendo finally giving a large number of fans what they wanted from the big N's console: HD graphics. There's been a lot of confusion about the upcoming consoles' capabilities as far as visuals are concerned, though. So we're going to go right ahead and detail the Wii U's hardware specs, or at least the ones that were revealed during E3 2012.
According to the company's press materials (taken directly from Ninty's E3 website), the Wii U has support for the following video outputs:
1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480p and 480i. Compatible cables include HDMI, Wii D-Terminal, Wii Component Video, Wii RGB, Wii S-Video Stereo AV and Wii AV.
It would seem that the Wii U is much more versatile than its predecessor as far as video out is concerned, with support for just about any video cable you'll find at Radio Shack. It can output 480i and 480p for SD content and older games that support prog scan, and then it's finally got the three main flavors of HD – 720p, 1080i and 1080p.
What's worth noting, and what seems to be the cause of some confusion amongst fans, is that the hardware's support of 1080p does not necessarily mean that every game is going to take advantage of it. It's a problem that is not new to consoles from the HD generation, as we have titles from the PS3 and the X360 that didn't take full advantage of the hardware's capabilities. So what about the Wii U?
Nintendo fansite Wii U Daily recently published a story that claims the system's launch titles will only run in 720p, which is still technically HD, but not the kind of HD that fans will flock to. The report was also substantiated by Nintendo, and worse, there are reports that native resolution isn't the only thing that the Wii U will have to work around, as there's also the issue of frame rate.
A large number of Wii titles only ran for 30 (NTSC) or 25 (PAL) frames per second, probably as a result of the hardware not being powerful enough to produce detail without sacrificing animation smoothness. According to Nintendo's Takashi Tezuka and Katsuya Eguchi, one of the problems they encountered with the Wii U is taking advantage of two game pads at the same time, and admitted that the system performance will take a hit due to the extra screens that have to be rendered if such a configuration is used – frame rate could be cut in half.
Of course, it's still too early in the game to make conclusions about what the Wii U Can't and Won't Do. What we've seen so far is impressive, and as every single generation of consoles have proven, hardware specs may be easy to tout, but it's still the library that's going to make or break a console (and we've already seen powerful hardware get crunched by weaker ones that have stronger game libraries).
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